Even if you already believe that your Dropbox account has everything you can ever want from a cloud storage solution, think again. There are numerous digital tools you can use to fortify Dropbox and expand its capabilities.

The first step in the actual design of the AD DS structure is the decision on a common domain name system (DNS) namespace that AD DS will occupy. AD DS revolves around, and is inseparable from, DNS, and this decision is one of the most important ones to make. The selected namespace can be as simple as microsoft.com, for example, or he can be more complex. Multiple factors must be considered, however, before this decision can be taken.

Windows Server 2012 AD DS domains can be linked to each other through the use of a concept known as trusts. A confidence is primarily a mechanism which makes it possible resources in a field to be accessible by the users authenticated from another field. AD trusts take on many forms but typically fall into one of the four categories described in the following sections.

If you look at the PreviewRibbon example code, you'll find that it has a relatively large number of files containing complex code. Writing a COM wrapper for the Ribbon isn't for the faint of heart. With this in mind, you'll probably want to use a pre-written wrapper to make your Ribbon development easier.

There isn't any easy way to obtain the support you need for working with the Ribbon. Unlike the Taskbar examples, you really do need the Windows 7 Software Development Kit (SDK) to create Ribbon-based applications for Windows 7.

You can configure alerts to notify you when certain events occur or when certain performance thresholds are reached. You can send these alerts as network messages and as events that are logged in the application event log. You can also configure alerts to start applications and performance logs.

When you’re troubleshooting problems, you’ll often want to log performance data over an extended period of time and then review the data to analyze the results. For each data collector that has been or is currently active, you’ll find related data collector reports.

You can use data collectors to record performance trace data whenever events related to their source providers occur. A source provider is an application or operating system service that has traceable events.

With the high-speed disks available today, a system’s hard disks are rarely the primary reason for a bottleneck. It is more likely that a system is having to do a lot of disk reads and writes because there isn’t enough physical memory available and the system has to page to disk

Performance Monitor can present counter statistics in several ways. By default, it graphs the statistics. A graph is useful when you are tracking a limited number of counters because you can view historical data for each counter that you are working with.

The most commonly tracked performance objects are Memory, PhysicalDisk, and Processor. When you first open Performance Monitor, Performance Monitor is configured to graph only the % Processor Time counter.

You can use Performance Monitor and Reliability Monitor to track the overall reliability of a server. Performance Monitor graphically displays statistics for the set of performance parameters you selected for display.

As with other mobile, touch-based systems, Windows 8 includes a simple Camera app that works with the camera (or, in the case of some modern devices, the cameras) that is included in (or attached to) your PC or device.

By this point, you should have Photos configured to work with some combination of your local photos, SkyDrive-based photos, and possibly your Facebook and Flickr-based photos as well. That’s a lot of photos

Try to find Windows Backup from Start Screen Search, or by searching the classic Control Panel, and you’ll come up blank. The term backup yields results for File History only, and a search for windows backup will actually come up empty. It’s almost like they don’t want you to find it.

When you encounter a problem with your PC, be it performance related or otherwise, you can now undergo a surprisingly fast process in which Windows 8 is quickly wiped out and reinstalled in a factory-fresh condition.

When the time comes to recover a lost or previous version of a file, you have two basic ways to access the new File History restore functionality. You can relaunch the File History control panel and click the Restore personal files link.

There are two final, extreme Storage Spaces configurations, both of which involve using three disks with either mirroring or parity. In a three-way mirrored configuration, Storage Spaces works just like two-way mirroring, except, of course, that your data is replicated on three physical disks.

While a single-disk storage space has some value, the inability to add resiliency at a later date seriously hampers that kind of configuration. As far as we’re concerned, the real value of Storage Spaces begins when you have two or more disks you can use in a mirrored setup.

The simplest possible Storage Spaces configuration involves just one (additional) disk, which you will use to create a single storage pool that can then be divided into one or more storage spaces; we’ll use one to keep things simple.

Anyone who remembers IRQ conflicts will be thankful that current computers support ACPI BIOS. With ACPI BIOS, resources are allocated automatically by the operating system at startup, and multiple devices can share the same IRQ settings

Windows Server 2012 built-in hardware diagnostics can detect many types of problems with hardware devices. If a problem is detected, you might see a Problem Reporting balloon telling you there is a problem.

Device drivers are essential to the proper operation of Windows Server 2012. A faulty device driver can cause many problems on your systems—everything from unexpected restarts to application hangs to blue screens.